The intraparty feud over whether Nevada or South Carolina gets to kick off the 2028 Democratic primary has turned incredibly vulgar over the past week. State party chairs are sniping at each other in the press. Activists are demanding representation. It is a chaotic, undignified spectacle.
But after a quiet lunch at Café Milano yesterday with a few senior committee members—whose names I will keep off the record, though one of them recently lost a high-profile congressional race despite spending forty million dollars—I am convinced that both states are entirely missing the point.
South Carolina points to its decisive, king-making role in recent party history. Nevada points to its diverse, working-class union base as the true bellwether of the modern electorate. They are both wrong. The fundamental purpose of an early primary is not to measure the will of the people. It is to provide a frictionless, six-week testing ground for the messaging strategies of Washington’s most expensive media consultants.
Let's be honest: putting Nevada first is a logistical and optical nightmare. The state’s political engine is driven by the culinary workers union. These are service industry professionals who are deeply engaged with material reality. If you put them at the front of the calendar, they stubbornly demand concrete answers on housing costs, tipped wages, and corporate landlord regulations.
I was speaking on a panel at the Aspen Institute just last month—titled "Defending Democracy from the Electorate"—and the consensus among the attendees was absolute. When you let working-class voters set the national tone, you force candidates to make specific policy promises that are incredibly awkward to walk back during a general election pivot to the center. It ruins the flexibility of a vibes-based campaign.
Then there is South Carolina. The state demands a grueling, relentless schedule of retail politics. Candidates are expected to sweat in church basements, eat heavy regional barbecue, and pretend they enjoy the company of people who buy their own groceries.
We are asking our brightest political minds to risk their bespoke Loro Piana quarter-zips in crowded community centers just to appease voters whose primary concern is the cost of prescription drugs. It is a staggering misallocation of elite resources.
If we allow everyday residents of Charleston or Las Vegas to dictate the early narrative, we risk accidentally nominating someone who genuinely feels obligated to govern them.
The real victims of this calendar fight are not the residents of the early states. The true victims are the campaign managers, the pollsters, and the senior strategists who are forced to spend January and February flying commercial into regional airports.
Have you ever tried to book a decent block of luxury suites in Reno during convention season? It is a harrowing experience. We are taking the smartest people in the Beltway—people who could easily be making seven figures at a private equity firm—and punishing them with three-star hospitality and terrible room service.
Furthermore, there is the sheer financial waste of a traditional early state ground game. Campaigns spend tens of millions of dollars hiring local organizers, printing literature, and renting field offices. Think of the opportunity cost.
That is money that could be vastly better spent on algorithmic television ad buys designed by D.C. consulting firms, which conveniently include a standard fifteen percent agency commission. By insisting on door-to-door voter contact, South Carolina and Nevada are literally taking food out of the mouths of our most vulnerable media buyers.
The solution is painfully obvious to anyone who operates at the highest levels of the party apparatus. The 2028 primary calendar should not kick off in the Sun Belt or the South. It should begin with a closed-door donor retreat in Martha's Vineyard, followed by an exclusive weekend in the Hamptons, and concluding with a private Zoom caucus limited to the tri-state area’s most reliable bundlers.
Why should the highest office in the land be subject to the whims of the people who merely live in it? When a Fortune 500 company selects a new chief executive, they do not ask the warehouse workers to vote on the candidates. They let the board of directors decide.
The Democratic Party is, functionally, the most important corporate entity on earth. It is time we stopped pretending its management should be crowdsourced to the general public.
The ideal first-in-the-nation primary environment is a climate-controlled conference room at the St. Regis, where the optics can be tightly managed and the riffraff are kept safely behind a velvet rope.
I can already hear the objections from the progressive wing of the caucus. They will say this process disenfranchises millions of diverse voices and abandons the working class. They will claim that skipping the early states is an insult to the people who build our cities and harvest our food.
To which I say: have you considered the optical disenfranchisement of a candidate who looks exhausted on CNN because they had to fly coach to Columbia, South Carolina? We have to protect our nominees from the degrading spectacle of retail campaigning. A candidate who has not slept in a Westin for three weeks simply cannot deliver a crisp soundbite on Sunday morning television.
Ultimately, by stripping South Carolina and Nevada of their early voting status, we are doing their residents a profound favor. We are freeing them from the heavy burden of civic duty.
They will no longer be subjected to endless text messages, unsolicited door knocks, and misleading television advertisements interrupting their evening programming. They can simply sit back, relax, and accept whichever deeply compromised centrist the donor class has thoughtfully selected for them.
We have spent hundreds of millions of dollars teaching the base that democracy is fragile, and now they stubbornly insist on handling it themselves. It is a messaging disaster.
The 2028 election will be the most important of our lifetimes, a true battle for the soul of the nation. And if we want to save our democratic institutions, the very first thing we must do is make absolutely sure the voters get nowhere near them.